Picture this. You've just come home from a long day at work. It's time to kick back, plug in, and let off some steam while playing your guitar.
How do you typically play for fun while at home? Lug out your half stack? Grab that tin-y sounding practice amp from the closet that you purchased 20 years ago?
With Spark Pearl, there's a way to practice, jam and record in style – right there in your living room – and sound great while doing it with access to an endless well of inspiring tones. Positive Grid's brilliantly limited version of one of the industry's most popular desktop amplifiers, Spark Pearl offers all of the same crowd-pleasing smart features of the original amp, like Smart Jam, Auto Chords, and access to over 10,000 tones.
Plus, with its snowy white tolex, gold piping and contrast-stitched custom strap, you'll proudly display it in your living room or home studio. (I mean, just look at that thing!) Spark Pearl is a Bluetooth speaker too, perfect for streaming your favorite tunes to liven up any social gathering.
On its own, Spark Pearl offers seven high-quality amp settings to choose from, including hi-gain, clean and crunch. These sounds can be customized further with bass, mid and treble tone stack controls, plus mod, delay and reverb effects. Users can also save up to four tones directly to the amp for later use.
However, Spark Pearl's inspiring tone creation capabilities go way beyond the amp itself. With the companion Spark app, players can access the same tone engine that put the original Spark on the map. Here, guitarists can craft tones virtually using 30 tube amps and 40 effects powered by Positive Grid's BIAS technology, for perfecting that signature tone of their favorite player or discovering a unique sound of their own. They can also share their sounds using Positive Grid's online ToneCloud, which is home to over 10,000 tones created by famous guitarists, session players, engineers and producers from around the world.
Most pieces of guitar gear are designed with one person in mind -- the guitarist. As a result, thousands of amps and pedals have suffered the fate of being banished to basements, home offices and other designated practice areas. With a compact design highlighted by custom white tolex and gold piping, Spark Pearl looks like it could be a piece of modern home décor just as much as a guitar amp. So whether you want to jam in your living room, bedroom, kitchen, or anywhere else in your house, take comfort knowing that you'll look good in the process - so much so that you'll finally not get yelled at for leaving your gear sitting out in the living room!
Watch Spark Pearl’s premiere here.
An extremely limited quantity will be available in late April, and customers can take advantage of special pricing for early orders. Learn more about Spark Pearl at www.positivegrid.com/spark-pearl/ and sign up to be notified when it's available for purchase.
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Joe Bonamassa and "The Blonde Dot" Humbuckers
The first 800 sets feature limited edition packaging and bottom plates that are signed by Bonamassa and Seymour W. Duncan himself.
Joe knows a thing or two about Gibson’s P.A.F. humbuckers – the earliest versions of Seth Lover’s milestone innovation in pickup design. Vintage Gibson ES-335s are known to be some of the finest semi-hollow instruments ever built – and the P.A.F. humbuckers they were originally equipped with are the vessel for the powerful sound and sustain that these guitars are known for.
When Seymour Duncan approached Bonamassa to recreate a set of humbuckers from one of his favorite ES-335s, he was quick to bring us one of the finest instruments in his collection – his rare 1960 dot-neck Gibson ES-335 with blonde finish, aptly named “The Blonde Dot”. Purchased from a friend who had an impressive collection of vintage dot neck 335s, Joe found that the pickups in the pristine Blonde Dot were some of the most balanced P.A.F.s in his collection.
Joe Bonamassa’s “The Blonde Dot” 1960 ES-335 Humbucker Set
Careful to keep the guitar in its immaculate condition – Seymour Duncan measured and recorded the original pickups to faithfully recreate them as “The Blonde Dot” 1960 ES-335 Humbucker Set. Joe describes the neck pickup as “stratty and clear” and the bridge pickup as “punchy and dark”, making a balanced set that he knew would sound good in any guitar. To capture these tones, this vintage set uses an Alnico 2 magnet in the neck, whereas a stronger Alnico 4 magnet was found to best deliver the qualities of the original bridge pickup. To match the like-new original Blonde Dot, the nickel covers are unaged and come with black pickup rings. The first 800 sets come in limited edition packaging and with bottom plates signed by Bonamassa and Seymour Duncan himself. After these limited edition sets are sold, ”The Blonde Dot” pickups will be available with standard Custom Shop cosmetic options to perfectly match your ES-335, Les Paul, or any guitar that demands great P.A.F. humbucker tone.
For more information, please visit seymourduncan.com.
Anne McCue’s electric instruments of choice include a pair made by Hanson Guitars in Chicago.
“I try to approach the guitar differently, more like a piano, which has a broad palette and colors and textures, and I really focus on melody and harmony,” McCue says. “I don’t try to come up with riffs and licks that are classically guitar. I love that, but when I was learning guitar, I was learning more complicated chords than I-IV-V. As a child I was a huge Beatles fan, and their arrangements were really quite sophisticated.”
The Loneliest Saturday Night - Anne McCue & The Cubists
“The Loneliest Saturday Night” is the first single from Anne McCue and the Cubists new album, Wholly Roller Coaster.
Early on, McCue shared a nylon-string with her siblings and, later, taught herself on an SG copy one of her brothers brought home. She delved into the Reader’s Digest Treasury of Best Loved Songs, from her parents’ bookshelf. “It had the most beautiful songs, from the jazz era all the way up to Burt Bacharach. I learned all the jazz chords, and the major sevenths and minor sevenths—more complicated chords than most people start with.”
For McCue, who grew up in a small town outside of Sydney, Australia, her modernist take on the era of incense and peppermints is the latest stop in the musical Gulf Stream that she’s navigated. Buoyed by other canonical influences, from Ennio Morricone and Alfred Hitchcock soundtracks to the sophisticated guitar-pop of XTC, she has chased her muse from Melbourne blues jams to Ho Chi Minh City, where she played solo jazz and blues guitar at a hotel for a year. A return to Australia in turn led her to Los Angeles, following a lead from a friend about a band on the verge of breaking out that was looking for a female guitarist who could sing harmony. That group’s record deal and a subsequent solo contact both fizzled. But she moved to Nashville in 2007 on the advice of her manager, and found a home in the creative music hotbed of East Nashville.
“When I was learning guitar, I was learning more complicated chords than I-IV-V.”
Allowing the influence of the Western movies, like the classic High Noon, and her early country music heroes—most notably Johnny Cash—that she loved as a kid to pervade her songwriting, McCue dived into the currents of Americana and developed an international reputation over the course of seven albums, including the powerful Roll. That recording ranges over a variety of roots terrain, from the fingerpicked, elegiac “Ballad of an Outlaw Woman” to a boldly reharmonized, ripping cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” to the album’s most harrowing song, “Hangman,” about a lynching, driven by the raw, ghostly tones of her lap steel. The BBC’s influential DJ Bob Harris chose Roll as his top album of 2004. Over the years she’s toured the U.S. and abroad, hosted the smartly eclectic radio show Songs on the Wire on Nashville’s indie radio station WNXA, produced other artists, and played on sessions, mostly for friends—including modern psychedelicist Robyn Hitchcock.
Anne McCue's Gear
McCue’s acoustic is an old Guild dreadnought, captured with her here onstage at Nashville’s 5 Spot. It’s used as her primary instrument on “Witch Song?" and for sweetening elsewhere.
Photo by Jill Kettles
Guitars
- 1979 Gibson Les Paul
- Hanson Cigno
- Hanson Gatto
- Hanson Ravenswood 12
- Guild acoustic dreadnought
Amps
- Fender Blues Junior
- Custom Jamison (15/30 watts switchable)
Recording Gear
- Pro Tools
- Royer 121 mic
- Mojave Audio MA-50, MA-100, MA-200, and MA-300 mics
- Focusrite interface
Effects
- Line 6 DL4
- Electro-Harmonix ML9
- Fulltone Distortion Pro
- JHS Morning Glory
- Danelectro Rocky Road
- Strymon Flint
- Dunlop Cry Baby
- Boss OC-5 Octave
- EBow
Strings, Slide, & Picks
- D’Addario (.010 and .011 sets)
- The Rock Slide
McCue met Hitchcock, a native Londoner who moved to Nashville in 2015, when she produced an EP for Emma Swift, his wife, and Hitchcock invited McCue to be his guitar foil on 2017’s Robyn Hitchcock. Hitchcock, who came to fame as the leader of the Soft Boys, can be glibly described as a sane version of his idol Syd Barrett, the original Pink Floyd frontman and the guiding hand behind the Floyd’s marvelously playful and boldly psychedelic debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
“He didn’t want lead guitar on the album,” McCue explains. “He wanted two guitars working together, so it was more about riffs that would fit with what he was playing. I went around to his house and we played, to try out things, before we went into the studio.” The result is a guitar conversation as literate and bristlingly playful as Hitchcock’s always-clever lyrics.
“I wanted to make a record that made people feel like they were stoned without actually having to work hard.”
That planted the psilocybin seeds of a new musical direction, but they really sprouted during the pandemic, when Pink Floyd became an important and soul-buoying part of McCue’s musical diet. “The pandemic gave me a chance to get off the treadmill of everyday existence,” she relates. “One day, I listened to the first seven Pink Floyd albums [including early live recordings] and never even got to Dark Side of the Moon. It was an epiphany. I listened to Pink Floyd and XTC for days and days and days. It took me out of a long gray tunnel into an open space, and I hear that space in the music.”
When she began playing guitar, McCue didn’t initially encounter the good ol’ I-IV-V. “I learned all the jazz chords, and the major sevenths and minor sevenths—more complicated chords than most people start with,” she says.
Photo by Jill Kettles
Which is only right, because, as Sun Ra declared, “Space is the place.” It breathes life into Wholly Roller Coaster, which McCue crafted with her band, the Cubists—although McCue played guitars, bass, keys, percussion, bouzouki, and electric sitar (which opens the album, with the gently hallucinogenic “Fly or Fall”) herself, at her home studio, Flying Machine. Even when contemplating the quirky nature of humanity in “Leaping on the Moon,” which has a soaring EBow finale, her lyrics possess grace and empathy—the latter another element that taps the spirit of Pink Floyd’s less acerbic work. And her often-playful rhyming swims in the same channel as Barrett and Hitchcock. By the time the album ends with “The Years,” which offers a backwards guitar solo in the middle of its observations on the passage of a lifetime, a repast richer than “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast” has been served.
“There’s a comforting, expansive, and inspiring space to get into,” McCue says. “I wanted to make a record that made people feel like they were stoned without actually having to work hard … so you could get lost in the sound.” And want to stay lost, for a good, long while.
YouTube It
Anne McCue & the Cubists recently filmed McCue’s “Witch Song” for NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest.
I think it’s fair to say that the Fender Marauder, like Gibson’s Moderne, was ahead of its time, and neither guitar made it beyond the prototype stage—at least not as originally designed.
The Marauder’s ’60s production model came with three pickups in a Jaguar-style body, many rocker switches, German carve headstock, and some even with slanted frets. It was later offered as part of the Modern Player series as well as through the custom shop. But the original design and concept of the Marauder was quite different.
In order to see what Leo Fender cooked up in the mid ’60s, we will have to take a short journey back in time, firing up the flux capacitor in our DeLorean with 1.21 gigawatts of energy. Our destination is the Fender factory in California, somewhere between 1963 and 1964—the early beginnings of the space age. The United States worked on the Apollo program at the same time the former Soviet Union worked on the Luna program on the other end of the world. Europe was busy developing and building the Concorde, and Leo Fender, sitting on the porch of his home in Orange County, was ready for his next stroke of genius.
Today, “less is more” is a common approach, not only in the guitar industry. But back then, it was “more is more” and “the more, the merrier.” Leo Fender offered the Esquire with one bridge pickup, and the two-pickup Esquire/Telecaster followed soon after. The next step was the Stratocaster with three pickups, which was mostly influenced by Bill Carson, one of Leo’s favorite guitarist guinea pigs in the ’50s. The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups, and that was exactly the idea behind the Marauder project. There are other guitars with four pickups, like the Japanese-made Teisco/Kawai EG-4T (nicknamed the “Hertiecaster”), or the Italian-made Welson Kinton, Galanti Grand Prix V4, and Eko 500/4V. But Leo Fender went the extra mile with his Marauder concept and installed the pickups underneath the pickguard for a very sleek aesthetic.
“The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups.”
Let’s have a look under the hood: The patent for the Marauder was filed March 6, 1964, and granted December 6, 1966—US patent #3290424—so we can say that developing and prototyping probably started somewhere in 1963. In addition to the four pickups under the pickguard, the original Marauder had a 3-way switch for each of the pickups, plus a Telecaster-style master volume/master tone configuration. On the patent, you can clearly see that the guitar was planned as an offset-type like the Jazzmaster or Jaguar using the same hardware.
There was, however, a one-off prototype built around a Stratocaster that has a dedicated 3-way lever pickup selector switch from the Telecaster and Stratocaster (the 5-way switch was not yet invented then) for each pickup, which looks really weird.
The Pickups
The pickups in the Marauder were designed by a man named Quilla “Porky” Freeman, a Western-swing musician and tinkerer based in Missouri. These large, slightly offset experimental pickups featured a dozen pole pieces and deep armatures, which helped give it a percussive tone. To compensate for the distance from the strings, the pickups were overwound. The patent document clearly states that all four pickups had the same winding direction (phase), but different magnetic polarity. The first (bridge) and the third pickup had south polarity, while the second and fourth (neck) pickup had north polarity, which was a clever move. This was the start of what is known as a “stealth pickup” today, often used as the hidden neck pickup on an Esquire. For such a construction, it’s important that the pickguard material is non-magnetic.
The Switching Matrix
Each of the pickups is connected to its own 3-way on-off-on switch, allowing the corresponding pickup to be on, off, or on with reversed phase, resulting in a total of 48 different sounds between the four. If the idea of these 3-way pickup selector switches sounds familiar, that’s because this is the basic design of Brian May’s “Red Special” guitar that he built with his father Harold in 1963. While that’s the same time frame, it’s close to impossible that Leo Fender knew what Brian May was doing in the U.K., so two geniuses simply had the same idea at the same time.
Here we go with the wiring: The four toggle switches are double-pole on-off-on types, volume and tone are 250k audio, and the tone cap is a 0.05 uF type. To keep the diagram clean, I substituted all ground connections with the international symbol for ground.
Illustration courtesy of Singlecoil
That’s it! Next month, we will talk about a very cool and clever way to integrate a variable dummy-coil into a guitar, so stay tuned.
Until then… keep on modding!